1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relates to transmission of data over a computer network. More particularly, the present invention relates to caching data from a server, such as e-mail messages, at a location close to an end user to improve data access.
2. State of the Art
Poor performance is a major problem associated with end users who must access e-mail messages or similar personal data stored on a server over a wide area network (WAN). This problem is often due to a combination of high network latency and low transmission bandwidth. One possible solution is to cache the data at a secondary location closer to the end user. Known caching solutions are intended to deal with relatively static data, however, such as when proxy servers are used to store data in the form of web content. A data store comprising web content is considered “static” in the sense that a single data set may be provided for access by multiple users and typically does not require modification on a regular basis. A data store on an e-mail server, on the other hand, is comprised of multiple message stores that are constantly modified by separate users. By design, e-mail servers centralize frequent asynchronous activities from disparate locations, such as with e-mail server to e-mail server message processing and e-mail to client message processing. Thus, there is a high frequency of change in an e-mail data store, and maintaining synchronous information between a cache and a host e-mail server is not possible using conventional static caching techniques. Caching of an e-mail server needs to occur at a much more granular level, i.e., at substantially the same rate as transactions occurring on the e-mail server.
In view of the foregoing, what is needed is a system and method that overcomes the problems associated with caching e-mail messages or similar dynamically changing data on a network.